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GTK+ 3.2 Is Gold With Wayland, HTML5, Etc

Phoronix: GTK+ 3.2 Is Gold With Wayland, HTML5, Etc

With the official release of GNOME 3.2 coming later in the week, Red Hat's Matthias Clasen has christened the official version of the GTK+ 3.2 tool-kit. GTK+ 3.2 brings several interesting features since the inaugural GTK+3 release earlier in the year...

The HTML5/Broadway backend looks very interesting and might be a game changer. Imagine being able to run your apps via a web-browser (ie. OpenOffice instead of Google Docs, etc).

This kind of stuff has been possible for a long time via browser-based virtual desktops. The reason nobody does it much is because the resources required to run an instance of any traditional desktop app (something coded with the intent of running a full persistent process dedicated to a single user on a single machine) are many, many, MANY times higher than the resources required to implement an app targeted directly at the Web (something coded knowing that its running over a stateless protocol on a multi-user machine with a workload distributed to the client-side application wherever possible).

Basically, Broadway is just a really weak display server that keeps a huge app instance running all logic on the server, while a proper Web app (like Google Docs) runs a large majority of the code on the browser and keeps a very minimal amount of state, data, and logic on the server. Google Docs is significantly more scalable, and will perform significantly better as there's far less network traffic necessary do to most of the logic being local and only needing the network to sync changes (and multi-user editing).

This kind of stuff has been possible for a long time via browser-based virtual desktops. The reason nobody does it much is because the resources required to run an instance of any traditional desktop app (something coded with the intent of running a full persistent process dedicated to a single user on a single machine) are many, many, MANY times higher than the resources required to implement an app targeted directly at the Web (something coded knowing that its running over a stateless protocol on a multi-user machine with a workload distributed to the client-side application wherever possible).

Basically, Broadway is just a really weak display server that keeps a huge app instance running all logic on the server, while a proper Web app (like Google Docs) runs a large majority of the code on the browser and keeps a very minimal amount of state, data, and logic on the server. Google Docs is significantly more scalable, and will perform significantly better as there's far less network traffic necessary do to most of the logic being local and only needing the network to sync changes (and multi-user editing).

I think you might be too interested in dismissing this. Apparently Qt is doing something similar in Lighthouse.
Anyway, I dont think the point is to make it "scalable" but provide a quick way to run a single instance to a thin client (cell phone/tablet). You wouldn't need any client software other than a websocket browser.
Of course this is nowhere near ready but using the exact same code for both desktop and network instances is pretty cool.
Things left to do (at a minimum) if he's interested are, 1.security, 2.compression and 3. local store (this is probably the easiest to do but may require app changes which kinda defeats the purpose).
Someone else proposed mapping the cairo instructions to html5 canvas but as Mozilla found out, they don't map well. Perhaps this can be fixed, though.